2.3 The Theatre of Dreams

“Roll up gentlemen and ladies, roll up! Welcome to Deuteronomy’s Theatre De Fantasie, the show where your dreams come true!”
Henry Gordon Jago believes he has made a killer booking for the New Regency Theatre. Unfortunately, he is absolutely correct…

1 Comment

Styre
on April 17, 2017 at 8:31 PM

JAGO & LITEFOOT: THE THEATRE OF DREAMS

One of the best elements of “The Mahogany Murderers” was the way it played with narrative, recognizing differences in the story when told by Jago as opposed to Litefoot. Jonathan Morris tries something along similar lines in “The Theatre of Dreams,” playing with the concept of diegesis. Our heroes spend most of the latter half of the story trapped within the Théâtre de Fantaisie, a supernatural theater that imprisons those within inside their own dreams. Jago thinks he’s rich, with the Queen set to attend a show at his theater, Litefoot thinks he’s found a cure to Ellie’s vampirism, and so forth. At this point, the story adopts a series of quick cuts: from Jago in the theater to Litefoot doing research to the two of them discussing their successes in the tavern. Initially, this seems like a stylistic device, a way to move the story along without wasting time. But the cuts themselves are diegetic: the characters are experiencing these scenes in real time because the Théâtre itself makes them experience their dreams at that rate and in that order. Morris pulls this off with an expert’s touch. The story around it isn’t bad either, letting us see deep into the souls of the regular characters. If I have one complaint, it’s that Jago’s greatest dream is apparently achieving fame and fortune – and while that’s obvious with how he behaves, it doesn’t reflect the quieter, gentler, and even heroic person we’ve already seen when he’s put to the test. “The Theatre of Dreams” is a very, very strong story, the best in the set so far.